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I think, in fact, that Plato had this in mind where he justly
speaks of the Images of Real Existents "entering and passing
out": these particular words are not used idly: he wishes us to
grasp the precise nature of the relation between Matter and the
Ideas.
The difficulty on this point is not really that which presented
itself to most of our predecessors- how the Ideas enter into
Matter- it is rather the mode of their presence in it.
It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself
intact, unaffected by Ideal-forms present within it, especially
seeing that these are affected by each other. It is surprising,
too, that the entrant Forms should regularly expel preceding
shapes and qualities, and that the modification [which cannot
touch Matter] should affect what is a compound [of Idea with
Matter] and this, again, not a haphazard but precisely where
there is need of the incoming or outgoing of some certain
Ideal-form, the compound being deficient through the absence of a
particular principle whose presence will complete it.
But the reason is that the fundamental nature of Matter can take
no increase by anything entering it, and no decrease by any
withdrawal: what from the beginning it was, it remains. It is not
like those things whose lack is merely that of arrangement and
order which can be supplied without change of substance as when
we dress or decorate something bare or ugly.
But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very
nature, the base original must be transmuted: it can leave
ugliness for beauty only by a change of substance. Matter, then,
thus brought to order must lose its own nature in the supreme
degree unless its baseness is an accidental: if it is base in the
sense of being Baseness the Absolute, it could never participate
in order, and, if evil in the sense of being Evil the Absolute,
it could never participate in good.
We conclude that Matter's participation in Idea is not by way of
modification within itself: the process is very different; it is
a bare seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the
difficulty as to how Matter, essentially evil, can be reaching
towards The Good: there would be no such participation as would
destroy its essential nature. Given this mode of
pseudo-participation- in which Matter would, as we say, retain
its nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been-
there is no longer any reason to wonder as to how while
essentially evil, it yet participates in Idea: for, by this mode,
it does not abandon its own character: participation is the law,
but it participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under
a mode of participation which allows it to remain on its own
footing, its essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever
the Idea, within that limit, may communicate to it: it is by no
means the less evil for remaining immutably in its own order. If
it had authentic participation in The Good and were veritably
changed, it would not be essentially evil.
In a word, when we call Matter evil we are right only if we mean
that it is not amenable to modification by The Good; but that
means simply that it is subject to no modification whatever.
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